Auction of Land Draws Few Bids in Hungary

The residents of this tiny rural village in central Hungary didn't give much thought to a day that farmers here should have been awaiting eagerly for 40 years: the first chance to regain the land that the Communist authorities snatched from them.

Over the next six months, Hungarian farmers who lost their land to collectivization in the 1940's and 50's, or their descendants, can try to regain some property through auctions.

The claimants are entitled to coupons worth up to five million forints (about $67,000 at the current rate of exchange), which they can use to buy land or other property, or to invest in shares in newly privatized enterprises. To avoid speculation, those who buy land must farm it for five years.

Now, it was Vilonya's turn to hold its first land auction. Most residents, however, stayed away.

"Back then, we had cows, two oxen, horses, everything that was necessary to work our land," said Iren Zalanyi, a 79-year-old widow. "Now I have only my pension, so how could I start over?"

The compensation program, one of the central planks in the Government's plan to right the wrongs of the past, has collided head-on with the present. Hungary today is a very different place than the country of smallholders that it was four decades ago. Over the years, large cooperatives and state farms have gobbled up individual plots, and peasants tied to the land all their lives have turned into part-time gardeners.

The collapse of the Soviet market has left Hungary producing one-third more food than the domestic market can consume, and Western barriers to imports would be hard to crash even with an aggressive export program.

As a result, 7 percent of arable land has been taken out of production and livestock has been reduced by 15 percent to 30 percent in the past two years.

"I'd gladly sell my cows today, but who needs them?," said Lidia Kulics, 62, rapping her cows' muzzles with a stick when they began to stray. She says, perhaps with some exaggeration, that she has spent more on filing her claim, counting administrative and travel costs, than she is entitled to get.

The land auctions are the high point of the first compensation cycle. Other laws are intended to redress the property losses of Jews and other victims of fascism beginning in 1939, the loss of liberty of Communist-era prisoners and property losses by churches.

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Of 800,000 people who have requested compensation so far, only 120,000 intend to use their coupons to buy land. Of these, only one-fifth plan to cultivate the land themselves.

"The compensation program is based on a good, liberal principle: what was taken must be given back," said Laszlo Torok, a professor at the Keszthely Agricultural University. "But so much has changed: a lot of the land has been built up and society has benefited from using it for public services and to raise revenue."

If Mrs. Zalanyi's city-dweller sons have no inkling of how to plow a furrow or roll wheat into neat stacks, neither does she know how to work the land without the tractors and threshers and combines the collective has been using to cultivate the large fields of wheat.

"The farmers are left high and dry," said Professor Torok, "because they have no machinery and no capital, and the big plants that own agricultural equipment are going to be raising rental prices."

There was no contest and no suspense at the auction here, only tremendous uncertainty over whether the advantages of property ownership would ever outweigh the costs.

Endre Horvath, 43, the Mayor of Vilonya, bid first, and regained some of the woods and pastureland his grandparents had lost in 1949. But he said owning the property would make little difference in his life, since he would still have to lease his fields to the collective.

"The question is how farmers will be able to get machinery and how the cooperatives themselves will survive, because they're bankrupt, too," the Mayor said. "In the last 30 or 40 years we grew accustomed to expect that things would happen by themselves, if we just had faith. But faith doesn't go very far today."

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A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 1992, on Page 1001019 of the National edition with the headline: Auction of Land Draws Few Bids in Hungary. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe